New Samuel Beckett Studies

"It is an understatement to say that we have a "new Beckett" on our hands. Indeed, the corpus of Beckett's works that we read today has little in common with the Beckett canon of just a decade ago. In less than ten years, a textual revolution has taken place and it is still going on. It combines the discovery of unpublished notes and manuscripts, their digital editions, and new critical approaches attempting to take stock of a fast evolving corpus. The publication of the four volumes of the Letters of Samuel Beckett that began in 2009 has brought a host of hitherto unknown details about Beckett's readings, meetings, loves and interests. Daniel Gunn has calculated that Beckett wrote an average of one letter a day during his active career, and he condenses in this book's pages the many lessons one can derive from them. The genetic version of texts like The Unnamable published in 2014 as part of the "Beckett Digital Manuscript Project" has modified our interpretation of this difficult but groundbreaking novel. The 2012 publication of the Collected Poems has doubled the number of poetic texts available, whether by adding drafts, unpublished texts, or different versions of some poems in two languages. Marjorie Perloff, who has defended for a long time the idea that Beckett was primarily a poet, will examine these lyrical treasures in a new key. Mark Nixon had given us a detailed analysis of the German Diaries 1936-37 in 2011, covering Beckett's fateful trip to Nazi Germany. Here, he covers a broader array of unpublished texts"--